various definers of beauty as "the union of the Real and the
Ideal" "the expression of the Ideal to Sense," have done no
more than he. No one of these aesthetic systems, in spite of
volumes of so-called application of their principles to works
of art, has been able to furnish a criterion of beauty. The
criticism of the generations is summed up in the mild remark
of Fechner, in his "Vorschule der Aesthetik," to the effect
that the philosophical path leaves one in conceptions that,
by reason of their generality, do not well fit the particular
cases. And so it was that empirical aesthetics arose, which
does not seek to answer those plain questions as to the
enjoyment of concrete beauty down to its simplest forms, to
which philosophical aesthetics had been inadequate.

But it is clear that neither has empirical aesthetics said
the last word concerning beauty. Criticism is still in a
chaotic state that would be impossible if aesthetic theory
were firmly grounded. This situation appears to me to be
due to the inherent inadequacy and inconclusiveness of
empirical aesthetics when it stands alone; the grounds of
this inadequacy I shall seek to establish in the following.

Granting that the aim of every aesthetics is to determine
the Nature of Beauty, and to explain our feelings about it,
we may say that the empirical treatments propose to do this
either by describing the aesthetic object and extracting the
essential elements of Beauty, or by describing the aesthetic
experience and extracting the essential elements of aesthetic
feeling, thereby indicating the elements of Beauty as those
which effect this feeling.